Mass Effect: Andromeda

[brat-sampson]

80% of the dialogue options seem to be your character saying the exact same thing and getting the exact same response no matter what you pick, but that's also a trademark of the series.

I don't know, there were definitely branching paths for renegade/paragon conversation choices, which are apparently something else this game doesn't utilise, going instead for the Fallout 4 'fuck it, four options is enough and maps nicely to a console controller' option.

EDIT: Exploring unfathomably distant and incomprehensible new worlds page cunt

[Lemming]

I don't know, there were definitely branching paths for renegade/paragon conversation choices, which are apparently something else this game doesn't utilise, going instead for the Fallout 4 'fuck it, four options is enough and maps nicely to a console controller' option.

EDIT: Exploring unfathomably distant and incomprehensible new worlds page cunt

You're right, I'm being admittedly unfair on the previous installments[nb]or at least the first two, I don't remember ME3 offering much agency in conversations[/nb]. The Renegade/Paragon system has (as far as I can tell) been removed from the game entirely, probably becauase they couldnt be bothered giving you the opportunity to do anything Renegade-y in this. Fallout 4 is a good comparison, in that the writers are forcing you to play a predetermined character with predetermined goals and the only real control you get is whether you're sarcastic or nice about it.

[Bhazor]

The one redeeming legacy of Mass Effect? Asari make for great futas in Source Pornmaker.

Over the past few days, various game animators have pitched in their experiences with major animation projects to lend perspective to the criticism, explaining how animation is done at Andromeda's scale, who does it, and why comparisons to other games are often bunk. Animators, according to animators, are hardly the final step in the RPG animation process.

balls

[Shay Chaise]

I've never played any of these shit dating sim cunt games.

[Bhazor]

Crowbcat has done his inevitable compilation. Amazing stuff in there I paticularly like

Spoiler alert

the woman who is so smug she melts in to the sofa

[close]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KWkao73HuU

[Lemming]

Sofa-melt-lady almost made me shit myself. The guy jetpacking into the roof when you try to talk to him takes the cake though.

In other news, get a load of this:


But when I click "See details":


There's something wrong with the refund system, this sucks. If I don't get my £50 back, I'm going to go bananas at customer support. I was WELL WITHIN the 24 hour refund window.

[falafel]

Even if the only point of the creative endeavour is to create a consumer good?

Sorry, bit late on this, but yes. You could critique the output maybe through the lens of it having been motivated purely by profit, which could have some interesting insights about the culture that produced it. If you view it as a consumer, you're just buying into the nonsense, whether it's a good game or a bad one.

Companies do produce games for profit, like publishers print books for money, but it's our responsibility as humans to respond as humans rather than machines for consumption. Discerning taste and awareness of what we like will lead us to play what we enjoy and ignore what we don't. It's consumerism that leads people with limited means to buy games on day one with no idea whether they will get on with it and then get angry when it doesn't deliver 'value'. Like a 18th century patron angry because the artist painted the mole they don't like into their portrait. Victims of their own sense of entitlement, fostered by a culture that demands return on investment. ROI doesn't really pan out when applied to cultural artifacts, as far as I can see. Andromeda would have put me off without all the rage anyway and I will probably get it at a massive discount in the mid future. We've got it all wrong.

[falafel]

Uh... is anyone actually playing this?

I just don't know.

Maybe I'll enjoy it.

DA:I gets such a slagging but I still loved it.

But

Rubber faces.

MAybe they will fix rubber faces in a bit. If I buy in six months to a year it could be infinitely better, even if they don't fix the story. I mean, Destiny hired different voice actors, maybe Bioware could too. If it was worth it. And eventually it will packaged together with DLC.

Yeah, I'll wait. I've got around 70 other games in my to-do list anyway so why add another one? Actually really enjoying Mad MAx, then I've got DOOM, Ori and the Blind Forest, Shadow of Mordor, Just Cause 3, Tomb Raider 2013, hell I even haven't played Resi 4 and it's in my Steam library so why the hell not.

Yeah, this is actually fine, unlike that gif, which is not fine.

[HappyTree]

I doubt I will, unless I get an Xbone for another reason and I'm bored and I find it second hand on Amazon for like 5€. But then, the ME DLC was great: The Arrival, the Prothean character, Kasumi, Shadow Broker. The game would have been significantly poorer without them. As it was, I was significantly poorer after buying them! I felt it was worth it because it was great, but DLC does circumvent the second hand market. Which is probably why they do it so much.

I'd not feel it would be that worth it for Andromeda. The deterioration has been fairly linear. KotOR was amazing. That plot about the thing hiding in your cargo hold? A real surprise. The twist, you know that one, was a shock to me too. In Mass Effect I was chasing those first hits and it was all diminishing returns.

But the first one was promising enough. I'd've been happy with it staying at that level for the series. But it didn't. So now I can't see it pulling me back in.

[Thursday]

Seen plenty of people saying it's perfectly fine and they're enjoy it bugginess aside. But yeah no reason to rush, there's better games available, there will be patches and it will be cheaper in time.

[Mobius]

I'm playing the fuck out of it. It's great. If you like Mass Effect games you'll love this, I genuinely don't understand all the hate for it.

[Barry Admin]

Any reports on the multiplayer?

[Kelvin]

Any reports on the multiplayer?

You seen the Angry Joe clip he uploaded today, Neil? Made me laugh:

https://youtu.be/QIt2hq3I2Mw?t=32s

[Big Jack McBastard]

I'm not sure how it's possible but this looks worse with every snippet I see. Some of the environments look ok but nearly everything else radiates shonky design and casual gameplay, the voices are just plain awful, some of the Krogans are bad-hilarious and the physical fights, oh so epic.

I've been tooling through Dragon Age Origins again recently and noticed some of the fights are actually sort of difficult if you just blunder in, I've died like 4 times and I'm not even half done, versus zero deaths in Inquisition where blundering in was all that was needed. I noticed trap making also disappeared and on the fly potion/poison creation too, they regressed into making stuff easier and less convenient.

I suppose at least in ME:A you can actually fucking jump, Shepard getting stuck on a pebble was always a grand moment in the first ones.

[Thursday]

I bought this game a few weeks ago and it's so boring.  It's infuriating me, because I've not touched it in a couple of weeks and I'm thinking "well trade in again while it still has some value" But I also think if I give it another go some day, it might start to get interesting once things get going.

It's just fucking dull though. They had a solid premise that they completely fucked up. You should be moving forward, discovering new weird and wonderful alien species. Each planet would be an excuse to wrestle with an interesting sci-fi concept.

Instead there's 2 new species, one who are bad and one who are okay. The fuck were they thinking?

Well I guess this article showed what some of the problems were

http://kotaku.com/the-story-behind-mass-effect-andromedas-troubled-five-1795886428

(Short version, They spent years making No Man's Sky)

[Bhazor]

5 year development? Jesus fuck.

Just won a key for it in the Greenman Lootbox sale thing. I'm tempted to hateplay it.

[falafel]

I'm playing the fuck out of it. It's great. If you like Mass Effect games you'll love this, I genuinely don't understand all the hate for it.

Turns out he's right.

Got it on the cheap and have sunk 30 hours into it. It's a Mass Effect game. I am loving it. I think they have fixed the superficial shit that put me off and now... It's a Mass Effect game. Well, let's see how I feel when I get to the twist ending knowing there won't be a sequel.

Oops.

[falafel]

Right, so I finished it, and at 69 hours that's the most time I have ever put into a game, 2 more than Dark Souls.

I really, really enjoyed it. The highlights were as good as any other ME game. There was a brilliant set-piece towards the end. Voice acting was way better than I had been primed to believe. Most of the animation stuff seems to have been sorted. A custom Ryder got rid of the weird 'smelling your own farts' expressions that the default face had. Environments were gorgeous.

The problem is, I think it needed the full 70 hour plus investment to actually see all of this. It felt like it was too big, and too many ambitions had gone unchecked for too long. It needed reigning in. Maps were huge and getting around them was quite good fun once the rover was souped up a bit. But sometimes distances were just a little bit too far. Fast travel helped. Then, travelling around the galaxy map, takeoffs and landings, loads of cut scenes to hide loading times: I think this is what you might call engine trouble. Had to learn to be patient. Judging by the kotaku article and those loading times, I suspect the engine caused a huge proportion of the things people complained about. Fetch quests where you have to visit locations on three different planets are a bit of a folly when it takes the best part of a couple of minutes to essentially navigate through a series of menus to go to the next planet on the list. It's like they weren't expecting that to be an obstacle, otherwise maybe the quests would be more self-contained within the planets. And they didn't need six or however many there were. I'd have much rather had a couple with different biomes within them; it felt a bit odd going to 'the ice planet' then 'the tropical twilight planet' for example. With reuse of enemy types, samey situations, sometimes it felt like they had space to fill and not enough resources to fill it properly.

But god, some of the craftsmanship. The number of quests that WEREN'T just fetch quests or blowing things up - some lovely crew creative bits. Genuine funny moments. Alright, and some terrible attempts at humour too. Couple of interesting calls back to the original series. The usual mix of great, serviceable and downright shoddy writing. The glorious space opera bullshit.

There's an analogy that someone cleverer than me should think up but basically about 20 hours of my time with this game could probably have been better spent elsewhere, but the other 50 were bloody marvellous,  and it would be hard to split the one from the other without some major, major changes.

So really it would have been a pretty good start to a series that will presumably now never happen, where the team could have finally used what they learned about the engine and the universe they built to refine and polish and focus and streamline. But now Bioware is having to throw its energy at a fucking multiplayer MMO blah thing because the internet threw a wobbly (me included). And it will probably be good and exactly what people who like that sort of thing want but fuck all of them, I hate multiplayer games because I am shit at games and why would i want to flaunt that in front of other people and ruin their game while I'm at it? Where's falafel, oh he's over there being skewered by that level 2 space lizard again, tell him to come over here or we can't open the airlock fuck he died again.

Fuck people.

[Bazooka]

Still need to pick this up again, I did the first planet. But like Fallout 4 I was really dissatisfied I couldn't be an evil knob head, just few smug dialogue option's.

I just want another KOTOR or Neverwinter Nights from Bioware, please.

[falafel]

KOTOR then, right. I fucking hate Star Wars: this is a stupid question, but is that a barrier to liking KOTOR? I mean, i used to love Rebel Assault, so...

[brat-sampson]

The first KOTOR was great. Assuming it's aged ok, it's a total classic. The combat's obviously a few leagues behind ME and the whole game has a Star Wars flavour, but it's set in a totally different time to the movies, so no worries about Han Solo 'popping by' to give you a lift to fanwank territory or anything. I haven't played it since it came out but the bulk of the plot and some of the characters are still with me, so there's that. The second one started off well but descended into a buggy mess because Obsidian.

[Bhazor]

KOTOR then, right. I fucking hate Star Wars: this is a stupid question, but is that a barrier to liking KOTOR? I mean, i used to love Rebel Assault, so...

Ignore everything Brat Sampson says and play KOTOR 2. Its essentially a 40 hour rpg about the ethics of interventionist war and it came out the year when people were getting all lubed up for the war in Iraq. What I love about KOTOR 2 is that it hates Star Wars as much as I do. It rips up the light side dark side bullshit turns Jedi into petty bureaucrats turns cute comedy robots into mindless drones that will kill you at the flick of a switch and focuses on the faceless dead getting killed in droves by the heroes and villains.

Its written by Chris Avellone and if you've played his previous game Planescape Torment its the closest I've come to a game that matches its depth in writing. Although that might have been replaced now by the world writing in Tyranny which Chris also wrote. In case you're wondering yes I would bum him.

[Bazooka]

KOTOR then, right. I fucking hate Star Wars: this is a stupid question, but is that a barrier to liking KOTOR? I mean, i used to love Rebel Assault, so...

I am indifferent to Star Wars films, however I really like the universe and the games are bloody brilliant, KOTOR 2 is a better game than KOTOR 1, but play both if you ever get the chance. In the KOTOR games your character is average at combat but once you find yourself and become a jedi/sith things really open up. The choices you can make are great, can basically kill some poor fucker after helping them from loan sharks and reap all the rewards.

[falafel]

OK, I'm sold.